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Thu Huong Le · · 8 min readCoc Coc is aiming to be Vietnam’s Bing. Its ex-CEO wants to stop it
In Vietnam, local search engine Coc Coc has put up a good fight against Google for close to a decade now.
The company was launched in 2013 by a group of Russian and Vietnamese engineers. Leading the pack was Russian entrepreneur Victor Lavrenko, who later became the CEO of Coc Coc.
Victor Lavrenko, Coc Coc’s co-founder and ex-CEO (left), and current Coc Coc CEO Jean-Paul Schmetz / Image credit: Coc Coc file photos, edited by Timmy Loen
With a name that literally means “knock knock” in Vietnamese, the company sought to outdo Google in providing more localized search experiences to users in the country.
Over the years, several other local competitors have faded away, but Coc Coc has survived. Now, its search engine is in second place – only behind Google – and its browser is ranked third after Chrome and Safari in the country, surpassing even Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Unlike in China, where the Google ban has propelled Baidu to enormous success, Coc Coc has reached prominence without that luxury.
These days, the company isn’t receiving much attention despite being firmly entrenched as the number two search engine in the country, whereas companies like VNG, VNLife, and MoMo have been in the spotlight.
But a lot has been happening under the hood. While Coc Coc is gunning to solidify its market position, it was also entangled in a lawsuit against Lavrenko, its former CEO, who left the startup in 2018 and has been accusing it of engaging in unethical behavior – a charge that the company denies.
Google the goliath
Coc Coc arrived on the scene eight years ago with a team of engineers and executives from Russian search engine Nigma, which had battled Google in Russia.
The search engine was a spin-off project by Nigma, whose team wanted to test their search technologies in Vietnam.
Lavrenko told Tech in Asia at the time that the new search engine “better understands Vietnamese linguistics and rarely produces irrelevant results …. At least that’s our goal.”
So what does that mean? The search engine accounts for diacritics (the marks above a letter) without the user needing to type them out. Coc Coc also auto-completes search queries in Vietnamese faster by taking into account the diacritics.
Former CEO’s accusations
No “systematic problem”
The next Bing?
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Since 2013, Vietnamese search engine Coc Coc has been battling Google’s dominance in the country. But internal conflicts might have slowed its growth.
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